


What Happened To The Mouse?

by Wecanhaveallthree



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-25
Updated: 2020-03-25
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:47:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23305534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wecanhaveallthree/pseuds/Wecanhaveallthree
Summary: Gnaw on the Last City's marrow.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	What Happened To The Mouse?

**WHAT HAPPENED TO THE MOUSE?**

* * *

**I: Burying the Lead**

All cities are iterative. They start small - a bar, a field, a fixture of some sort - and grow from there. Cities are cunning. They understand that people are drawn to permanence, even the illusion of it, and if they come then so will others. And with more people, there will be more fixtures, and so on until that sole thing has become many, spreading like a blossoming flower or the black plague. Depending on your perspective.

The Last City was nothing but a collection of plastic tents and lean-tos under the shadow of a dead and silent god. Civilisation crouched in terror beneath a divine carcass.

There are worse beginnings.

You know much of the rest: Six Fronts. Twilight Gap. Walls were built and defended. Those flimsy first constructions turned to steel, then titanium, then more permanent materials as the City grew out and up. Districts came to the fore, then faded to the middle, then fell beneath others - progress can be such a cruel mistress.

But the Tower was necessary. From that height, they could never be taken by surprise again. From that height, they could be close to the dead god. From that height, they would be as far away from the history of petty kings and tyrants and one-horned devils that had made the City necessary in the first place.

There is an old saying: no man is dead until all those who knew him have died as well.

The witch-woman, she said, ‘I don’t want people even remembering his name.’ Makes you laugh, doesn’t it? A Warlock with all those years of experience, all those intelligence networks, all those libraries full of forbidden knowledge where the books read you back - and she thinks that the City will just forget? Oh, there’s blindness in hate, there’s ignorance in deep graves. She’s done her best to make her wish a reality as if the eye isn’t drawn to space where the subject was as much, if not more, than the subject itself.

Guardians, of all people, should know that the dead don’t stay buried long around here.

So come now, childe, grab your lantern and spade, your Ghost and your guns. Latch the door behind you, quietly, so mother doesn’t know you’ve gone. Cross the quiet markets. Come down the stairwell behind AR-31. Shimmy down this pipe, clamber through that hatch.

Come down to the Bathol District and you’ll learn what she didn’t want you to.

* * *

**II: Did you hear that?**

This passage has seen recent use.

Nothing so obvious as plain footprints in the dust that covers everything down here, that’d be too easy. It’s in the atmosphere. It’s in the aura. It’s in the straining of molecular bonds in the oxygen. It’s like dropping down into a pristine Lost Sector. It’s like seeing a crow beak-deep in the skull of an alien corpse.

A lot of old human beliefs talked about how constant use or wear imparts a sort of animus to an object or place. In a quiet school hallway, there might be faint footsteps of the generations of children who walked it before. In a deserted lounge with its faded fake leather and boarded-up windows, there might be a haunting of cigar smoke and cheap whiskey. Superstition and guff. Nobody has been here in, what, years? Decades?

But loneliness would be a far better feeling than the creeping paranoia of ‘something is in here with me and it doesn’t want to be seen until it does and when it will I will be food for the rats-’

That’s it. That’s the feeling. Rats. Surely that’s what it must be. What else could walk so stealthily in these forgotten spaces, in the tight gaps between walls, beneath the rusted metal walkways? What else could live down here?

There’s no Fallen kill-team surviving on last rations waiting in the dark. There’s no tang of ozone that precedes the rending howl of Taken. No skittering runes of the Hive. Nothing but the rats.

Red-eyed masters of this fallen domain. Hordes and hordes of them, spilling out in a tide of fur and yellow fangs and worming their way into every gap in armour, their wriggling bodies and gnashing teeth seeking flesh, seeking escape, seeking to move _through_ -

That’s right. Relax.

Nothing down here but us rats.

* * *

**III - Oaths and Stone**

There’s a heavy history hanging over the Bathol District, and it’s not just the vast weight of the Tower above that feels oppressive.

Maybe it’s the way the buildings are made. Boxy, flat-sided, with baffles and gun-ports. Maybe it’s the kill-zones and murder-holes that are obvious to the trained eye, and how they’re not discriminatory on where the threat might be coming from - outside or in. Nobody lived in peace here. Former Warlords rubbing shoulders with people they’d have enslaved under different circumstances. A keg of powder.

Strangely enough, nature has made inroads here, as if seeing the brittle weakness. Creepers and vines snake across cramped thoroughfares. Whole alleys are tangled in thorned bushes and poison-moss. Weeds thrust through the cracked stone.

Try not to step on any shell casings. This is a silence that would resent disturbance.

Push aside the hanging ivy. Up the angled stairs. Squeeze through the rusted gate. Easy, isn’t it? No harder than stealing an apple from your neighbour’s garden, and just as harmless. Think about the kiss of incisors, the swell of sweet juice rushing into the wounds, the first taste of ripe, ripe flesh - they’ll lead you to your destination.

Half-covered by lichen, beneath the gentle sway of lamps with shattered bulbs (is someone there?). Familiar. You’ve seen something like this, in a place like this, haven’t you? Put the thought of plucking trapped crabs from tide-pools away for the moment. Drooling in this sacred place would be unseemly.

But oh, how the white carapace glistens, even here, crisp and broken as an egg-shell.

Brush away the dross. Here, the writing, in terms you can understand. A pact. An oath. Sworn in the most visceral form (yes, the copper, the red, you can almost taste it, though how long ago must it have been?). The terms of an agreement between the forces that would form the Old Consensus, the meeting of Towering minds. Unbreakable. Because without trust, how would this nascent Age of the City be any better than what came before? They would work together, or they would fall together. So it was agreed.

If only the people knew how the compact had been broken. Their rage would shake the City to its bones. The Vanguard, already teetering, already tumbling, would come apart completely. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put it back together again. There would not be another Bannerfall.

There are three names etched on the Traveler-shard. Two are familiar. The third has been hacked away, brutally excised. But that absence is enough. If there’s blood in your mouth, it’s only where you’ve bitten your lip.

Not the hook’s first gentle pull.

Now-

* * *

**IV: fertile**

-what were you doing here?

Looking for what? A Fallen kill-team? Treasure? The king of rats, perched on his throne of felid bone? The _Bathol District?_ Don’t be absurd. Bathol was lost in the fighting around Twilight Gap. Everyone knows that.

How foolish. There’s a bright world above that needs you more than ever. Besides, you’re hungry. Maybe this is how the Drifter feels, all the time, like there’s a mouth below his mouth that eats everything he eats before he gets anything out of it. Like there’s a big space in his stomach and it just keeps getting bigger, just like how his smile keeps growing wider, and-

A shiver. A shake. Dark places breed dark thoughts. Enough.

Go up. Go back to the light.

You are a seed.

Keep growing.


End file.
